The Vegetarian PDF
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Fraught, disturbing, and beautiful, Han Kang’s novel about is about shame and desire, and our faltering attempts to understand the lives of others. Translated by Deborah Smith.
Yeong-hye and her husband are ordinary people living in modern day South Korea. He is an office worker with moderate ambitions and mild manners; she is an uninspired but dutiful wife. But then Yeong-hye, seeking a more ‘plant-like’ existence, commits a shocking act of subversion. As her rebellion manifests in ever more bizarre and frightening forms, Yeong-hye spirals further and further into her fantasies of abandoning her fleshly prison and becoming - impossibly, ecstatically - a tree.
"...there is no end to the horrors that rattle in and out of this ferocious, magnificently death-affirming novel ... Han’s glorious treatments of agency, personal choice, submission and subversion find form in the parable." - Porochista Khakpopur, The New York Times Book Review
"This is Han Kang’s first novel to appear in English, and it’s a bracing, visceral, system-shocking addition to the Anglophone reader’s diet. It is sensual, provocative and violent, ripe with potent images, startling colours and disturbing questions ... The Vegetarian is an extraordinary experience." - Daniel Hahn, The Guardian
Han Kang is a South Korean writer. She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University and her writing has won the Yi Sang Literary Prize, the Today’s Young Artist Award, and the Korean Literature Novel Award. She is also the author of Human Acts and The White Book. The Vegetarian is her first novel to be translated into English.
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